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The deal with the Culture is that it's impossible to have any civilisation that's not ultimately controlled by a privileged few wielding disproportionate power with the vast, vast majority basically powerless, so what the founders of The Culture basically did was accept that and go "yeah, okay, if I'm going to live in a world controlled by someone else and the odds of me being one of the people in control is so vanishingly small as to be irrelevant, then gently caress it, I'm going to build the person in power and make sure they're decent and have my best interests truly at heart instead of just being power-hungry assholes or demagogues"
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Sep 25, 2020 02:30
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:There is therapy, it's mentioned in the backstory of a minor character in.. actually isn't it in Excession? who's the sole human occupant of a Ship cold storage location. He's noted as having gone through all sorts of therapy and help from Minds but still remained weirdly misanthropic. So they put him somewhere where he'd be happy without people constantly trying to improve him. Yeah, they say that he probably was 'fixable' to norms but doing so would change him so very much so that he'd no longer really be him and he was uncomfortable with that, so instead they were able to find a niche where he could be happy as he was instead.
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Sep 25, 2020 02:33
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indigi posted:but at the end he's hanging out with the family groups anyway Yeah well the trauma from being murdered isn't really an accepted therapy technique
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Sep 25, 2020 03:01
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Okay putting all that aside, my god what idiots think the culture represents a libertarian ideal? It's a civilization where you expressly surrender the care of your rights to a wiser and more powerful all-judging being!
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Sep 28, 2020 13:44
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Look, Bezos is veppers and musk is the GFCF, envying the culture without actually getting it.
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Sep 29, 2020 01:54
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mind the walrus posted:A lot of the Culture is also "What if Star Trek was really unchained?" Well, more specifically "What if Star Trek The Next Generation was unchained", it actually surprised me that the Culture predates TNG. I wonder if Rod read the early books when TNG was in development.
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Sep 29, 2020 02:30
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mind the walrus posted:There's no way that the people "under" Roddenberry developing TNG were unaware of The Culture. No way. Eh, maybe. Phlebas came out early 87, TNG launched late 87. And Phlebas wasn't the greatest demonstration of The Culture itself. I'm sure the writers would've been aware during the run of the show, though; you had Player of Games, State of the Art and Use of Weapons all out by 1990. Hell, it's possible they counter-influenced each other, TNG might've influenced Banks in ways too, if only in wanting to do certain things less shallowly than the show did. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Sep 29, 2020 |
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Sep 29, 2020 13:00
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Torquemada posted:I’m going to need some citations here: I’ve watched a hell of a lot of Star Trek, and read a hell of a lot of Banks, and I’m struggling to find a single instance of even minor overlap. I'd say there's actually more culture influence in the original version of TNG. As initially envisaged, the Federation was meant to be much more strongly post-scarcity, but that kinda waned later on for drama's sake and ease of writing. Also, the Enterprise-D was meant to be a bit closer to the idea of a GSV, but they never really managed to pull that off, and scaled it back later. That's why the ship has children and families on it - the idea was that it was this massively powerful, supreme ship that carried an entire spacefaring slice of Federation society out into the unknown for a decade beyond the Federation's borders, a floating mini-planet that could go exploring, with parks and villages and neighborhoods on board. They could never depict it well and the ship got into enough trouble that it became more of a generic heavy cruiser thing. Even what we got on screen was pared back in development, too - the earlier version of the Galaxy Class had 5000 people and a huge civilian population aboard, with much more GSV-like settings. They considered a bridge where they all sit around a big table just looking at what's happening with screens and all actual orders and doing things are done by computers, and the ship is almost entirely self-maintaining and running. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Sep 30, 2020 |
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Sep 30, 2020 02:32
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Huh, I don't remember that, anyone have a quote? Seems weird to me, feels like a more culture way would be for the top floor+roof to be community space.
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Aug 12, 2022 02:33
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Ahhh. (Also it feels different having that setup in a hotel than in an apartment building)
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Aug 12, 2022 19:05
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Hmm. Not sure. I remember you used to be able to buy prints of these bits of cover art alt here (done by a goon, IIRC), but I can't find that any more. (I think those covers actually ended up getting used for an edition. Maybe the Czech one?) Speaking of covers, I believe the artist for the original UK covers of the earlier novels sells prints of the wider pieces at https://www.salwowski.com MikeJF fucked around with this message at 12:30 on May 10, 2023 |
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May 10, 2023 12:19
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Resurrecting this a bit to mention that people have started receiving copies of The Culture: The Drawings. Time to figure out the best way to get a copy in Australia.
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Nov 1, 2023 05:45
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quote:An example would be Diziet Sma, whose full name is Rasd-Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da' Marenhide: I'd do my own name as another example but that'd doxx me. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 12:38 on Dec 26, 2023 |
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Dec 26, 2023 12:35
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Uh Yeah it's mentioned in the epilogue that if you're reading this then Gurgeh's been dead and funerally displaced into the sun for many years by now, but that's just a 'these events won't be published for a long time' thing.
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Dec 29, 2023 06:43
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Oh, the Cliff class superlifter is an Escarpment class GCU that's been filled with engines instead. How twee. (I got the drawings for Christmas) (Would it really have killed them to do a contrast pass on this though?)
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Dec 29, 2023 15:18
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An effector is a deliberately vague omnipurpose remote sensor and and manipulator. It is a device that can have a precise effect at a distance. (Most effectively with EM fields, so the Culture is really good at remotely manipulating devices. Or even messing with brains.)
MikeJF fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 19:02
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Oh no on the Limiting Factor the blisters are just the bulges on the exterior of the ship that the effector (or other) equipment are inside of. Weaponised effectors are one of the main armaments of The Culture. E: this is the rough design of limiting factor. It has three front weapon blisters and five midship weapon blisters, spaced around the sides of the ship. (It's circular in cross section). They emptied the weapons out because it's demilitarised.  (That said, the main structural integrity of all Culture ships is by the fields and not by the physical matter, and there are Culture ships that crop up later in the series that don't even bother with in-between connective physical matter. For all Culture ships larger than a transport module the extent of the ship's 'hull' is considered to be the edge of its permanent forcefield envelope, not how far the matter reaches) MikeJF fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 19:08
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pygmy tyrant posted:I would say dueling musical motifs, building tension until a sudden silence and a distant flash without further explanation, Yeah you can do that but you're not really depicting it, that battle is a whole narrative sequence and character moment you'd be losing.
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Dec 30, 2023 14:06
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Alchenar posted:One of the things I really like about Banks as a sci-fi author is that he really gets the idea that once energy is effectively limitless and you have forcefield technology that for Newtonian purposes lets you tell the laws of physics to shut up and do whatever you tell them to, then a spaceship looks like whatever you want it to look like. It's mentioned in the notes and drawings that cruise ships (which despite not being in the books much are the most common ships in the culture, basically endlessly connecting orbitals together) are basically all entirely unique in appearance and shape because they can just be designed to look like whatever you fancy with no concern for practicality or even the duties a GSV has.
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Jan 5, 2024 11:51
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Megillah Gorilla posted:Is Brian Herbert busy nowadays? I heard he just found a stack of notes from Banks about all the books he was gonna write.
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Jan 5, 2024 14:55
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sebmojo posted:Matter is a much later book, I love it but it's very different. there's no real order to them but chronological works pretty well. You could try consider phlebas, that's got some rad set pieces and is probably a good companion to PoG, since it's from the perspective of someone fighting the Culture. My (unfinished, inelegantly laid out) personally recommended Culture reading dependency order  He took a break between the early novels and the last three and I feel like there's two distinct generations of Culture novels as a result. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Jan 6, 2024 |
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Jan 6, 2024 20:19
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Khanstant posted:Last thing, the book spoke to Marain's strengths and adaptability and such, but they didn't mention any fonts of typefaces. I wonder if their aversion to symbols extends to typography. In 88 I doubt anyone was even thinking about it much, but today when you have an ocean of fonts available and sometimes the easiest way to find a font you want is to actually just search for the mood, idea, concept, associations you want the font to invoke. It's a little surprising how rarely authors utilize different fonts despite how much they can communicate. Only a little, because picking even one font can be exhausting and make you wish you simply didn't have a choice in the matter. The basic digital form of Marain is a 3x3 dot grid (really it's just a nine-bit binary sequence). Marain glyphs are drawn-together lines of the dots but everyone can also read the basic grid version too.   (There's about a dozen pages of random jottings and ideas on Marain in here:  )If you haven't read it, you may want to read a few notes on The Culture, it's a couple pages by banks in 1994 laying down some of the basic ideas. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Jan 7, 2024 |
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Jan 7, 2024 07:50
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